Why Do Locals Host Tourists?: Various Local Hosts’ Reasons for Choosing Airbnb Experiences and Their Motivations for Hosting

Abstract

This study attempted to understand how local hosts, who greet tourists on an online platform, got to know the platform and what motivated them to host, and as a result, it identified a variety of hosts accordingly. Until now, ‘new urban tourism,’ in which tourists are interested in locals’ daily lives, has been considered a tourist-led phenomenon, so research on the role of local people has not been fully conducted. However, local people are already key actors in local tourism through online platforms and their role in post-COVID-19 tourism is expected to become more important. As a result of the study, the way local people know and participate in the platform and the motivation for hosting are interrelated, and the effects of hosting vary depending on it. With research on tourists, research on local people who were consumers of local tourism in the past but become suppliers is necessary to comprehensively understand the changes in tourism and regions.